Papers by Red Ruby Scarlet - Miriam Giugni
Routledge eBooks, Apr 26, 2023
[N.B This is the Authors'/Artists' version]. The ever intense pre... more [N.B This is the Authors'/Artists' version]. The ever intense pressures for performative ‘excellence’ in the academy raises important questions for feminist academics working in HE, particularly as the space and place for matters ‘maternal' become increasingly complex. This chapter questions the compatibility of motherhood and academia for feminist academics of childbearing age. The small-scale study from which this paper is drawn focuses specifically on lives-lived by feminist academics, some of whom undertake research into various aspects of childhood, family life and parenting. Applying dimensions generated by ‘posthuman' theorising, this chapter attempts to de-centre the human subject and ask delightfully difficult questions about the ways in which feminist academics become entangled with the non-human (i.e. matter, animals, technology) or to borrow from Haraway (2008), naturecultures and pastpresents, so that we might reach fresh understandings about maternal entanglements at home and work. This mode of theorising is presented through a collection of mediums including narrative, Ode and photographic artwork (PhArt). Our aim is to transmogrify ways of knowing, doing and being gendered and how that can produce childhoods, motherhoods and worldlinesses by attending to everyday entanglements with more-than-human-worlds (Haraway, 2004). Transmogrifications are inclusive, fantastical and offer the means to understand the production of power afresh because transmogrifications are in blatant disguise – as either correct gendered becomings (the good/sensitive mother; the productive yet caring female academic) or oppressed ones because they appear normative. We might think of motherhood as a trope, a figure, as Haraway (2004: 129) reminds us sedimented figurations are sustained when: “people reaffirm many of their beliefs about each other and about what kind of planet the earth can be by telling each other what they think they are seeing as they watch (the animals)”. By encouraging halting conversations about motherhood we transmute and reconstitute irreducible details along lines of continuation, interruption and reformulation.
Global Studies of Childhood, 2015
This article seeks to disrupt contemporary cultural imaginations about children and childhood; we... more This article seeks to disrupt contemporary cultural imaginations about children and childhood; we offer some provocations to think differently about the regulation and governance of gender by taking a step back to consider children and childhoods more expansively and generatively, as becomings. Underpinning these concerns is the principal objective to explore ways in which posthumanist theorizing can be translated into posthumanist methodology through arts-based practice. In an attempt to illustrate how we have approached this we revisit several core onto-epistemological dilemmas posed by Lather (1993) when she asks: what counts as valid knowledge? Which then leads us onto ask what counts as data? What does data do? And what do we do with what the data does? By experimenting with a range of mediums (photography, artwork and poetry) ‘in a game of cat’s cradle’ (Haraway, 1994) we explore the potential that posthumanist approaches offer to extend and stretch the parameters that have co...
co-authored with Maria Magiropoulos
co-authored with Tracey Freeburn
co-authored with Affrica Taylor and Lyn Fasoli
Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 2012
ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to disrupt contemporary cultural imaginations about children and childhood; we o... more This paper seeks to disrupt contemporary cultural imaginations about children and childhood; we offer some provocations to think differently about the regulation and governance of gender by taking a step back to consider children and childhoods more expansively and generatively, as becomings. Underpinning these concerns is the principal objective to explore ways in which posthumanist theorising can be translated into posthumanist methodology through arts-based practice. In an attempt to illustrate how we have approached this we revisit several core onto-epistemological dilemmas posed by Lather (1993) when she asks: what counts as valid knowledge? Which then leads us onto ask what counts as data? What does data do? And what do we do with what the data does? By experimenting with a range of mediums (photography, artwork and poetry) ‘in a game of cat’s cradle’ (Haraway, 1994) we explore the potential that posthumanist approaches offer to extend and stretch the parameters that have come to shape established ways of knowing and becoming in early childhood.
N.B. This is the author/artist copy prior to going to press. Abstract: The aim of this chapter is... more N.B. This is the author/artist copy prior to going to press. Abstract: The aim of this chapter is to consider possibilities to reconfigure ‘quality’ within the complex field of early years education and care. The chapter charts the persistence of quality discourses in early childhood education in the English context and goes on to revisit the inherent dangers that lurk within those discourses. We unpick aspects of the recent Nutbrown Review: Foundations for Quality (2012) with its focus on professional qualifications, and career pathways which (yet again) calls into question the ‘quality’ of the early childhood workforce. Whilst collective professional subjectivities of educators might be understood as contained within regulatory discourses it is our intention to move beyond deconstructing discourses and critiquing policy to think beyond quality. To do this we attempt to look beyond (and with) the subject (Butler, 1993) to argue that quality and professional subjectivities in early childhood are of the world, not just the person - quality is everywhere and part of everyday life (Haraway, 2008). By working with some posthumanist concepts we attempt to move beyond conceptualisations of ‘quality’ as discursively constructed within discourses – that then contain professional subjectivities. Our aim is to offer a generative reconfiguration of ‘quality’ which traces material-semiotic entanglements within early childhood contexts. By moving away from hegemonic framings of ‘quality’ and by inviting an engagement with curiosities, bodies (human, non-human and more than human), and desires our intention is to map new territories about ‘quality’ in the context of the early years and introduce ideas about the qualia of ‘becoming quality’. We do this by working with, through and beyond conventional textual representations by putting art (PhArt and Ode) to work to reach new and more generative understandings of quality.
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Papers by Red Ruby Scarlet - Miriam Giugni